Mark Balkenende is a Sales Solution Architects Manager at Talend. Prior to joining Talend, Mark has had a long career of mastering and integrating data at a number of companies, including Motorola, Abbott Labs and Walgreens. Mark holds an Information Systems Management degree and is also an extreme cycling enthusiast.

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of our new Talend Big Data Sandbox, based on Docker. For those not familiar with a Sandbox, it’s a FREE, pre-configured, easy-to-use, virtual environment that allows you to experiment and test real-world big data scenarios. Much like your favorite “Choose Your Own Adventure” books from the 80s and 90s, the latest version of Talend’s Sandbox allows you to create your own big data adventure in mere minutes. Want to start working with Apache Spark? Easy! Would you like to see how a Hadoop distribution would run side-by-side in real time? No problem!

Evaluating big data technology in business scenarios is critical in an age where every data-driven enterprise is trying to transform enterprise information into a strategic asset. Often, when embarking on big data projects, technology choices are made too quickly and companies struggle to generate ROI. For this very reason, we’ve taken things up a notch with this version of the Sandbox and powered it with Docker and Talend Studio.

Docker technology offers developers a way to package their application into a standardized piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything needed to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything that can be installed on a server. This allows developers to quickly evaluate a variety of ready-to-run big data scenarios, tools and platforms within a virtual environment so that they canbetter understand the end-to-end lifecycle of a big data project and how it is likely to perform in their current environment.

So what exactly can you do with Talend’s new Big Data Sandbox? Let’s dive into some features and functionality:

5 Real-World Scenarios to Test, For Free!

As any developer worth his or her code knows, it’s not enough just to make sure that big data technologies work. In order to know whether a platform or tool will be successful for the business, it needs to be tested in real-world scenarios. This is why we’ve included 5 ready-to-run, “big data adventures” in this new version of the Sandbox:

In these different scenarios, you will see everything from Spark Batch and Spark Streaming, to MapReduce and Hive. How data moves from Kafka into a data stream and processed out to NoSQL Databases like Cassandra.

Get Your Hadoop Elephant Moving with a Docker Whale

As stated previously, we’ve powered up this version of Talend’s Big Data Sandbox using Docker. Why? Simply to allow you to easily choose which Hadoop distribution components you want to use.

For example, if you are working with Kafka and Local Spark, but don’t need to see Talend running on a Hadoop Cluster, then you can avoid the additional download (which means we can deliver a smaller download and you will be up and running even faster). Like I said at the beginning, with the new Talend Big Data Sandbox, YOU choose your own big data adventure! Because Docker is already included in the Sandbox, you can also choose to take advantage of the HUGE Docker community and pull other containers in to try out with Talend, such as perhaps a MongoDB container or Neo4j. The possibilities are really endless. Not only can you experiment with the ‘pre-packaged’ adventures we provide, but you can now create your own adventure using Talend’s new Big Data Sandbox.

Let’s Get Started!

This is by far the most functional, simple and coolest Sandbox I’ve worked with (though I may be biased). Whether you are a data architect, data scientist, lead developer, head of IT or just someone who wants to see what Talend is all about, I think you’ll get a lot out of insight and benefit out of this version of Talend’s Big Data Sandbox.

Talend will also be hosting live demonstrations of our Big Data Sandbox at Strata + Hadoop World 2016, taking place in New York. Each booth visitor will receive a free version of the Sandbox as well as be entered to win a drone each day of the show. Visit Talend in booth #645.